Jesus is The Christ

[Christsfreeservant]

“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.” (1 John 5:1-5 NIV)​

Essential to our faith in Jesus Christ is that we believe that he is the only begotten Son of God, conceived of the Holy Spirit, and that he is God, the second person of our triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. While he lived on the earth he was both God (God incarnate) and man, but without sin. We must believe that he is the Christ, the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Deliverer, the Savior of Israel and of the world. But belief is not just with our minds, but it is in our hearts, and it is evidenced by our actions.

[Isaiah 53:1-12; Matt 26:26-29; Lu 17:25; Jn 1:1-36; Jn 6:35-58; Jn 8:24,58; Jn 20:28-29; Rom 5:8; Rom 9:5; 1 Co 11:23-32; 1 Co 15:1-8; Php 2:5-11; Col 2:9; Heb 1:8-9; Heb 2:14-15; Heb 4:15; 2 Pet 1:1]

So, if we truly believe that Jesus Christ is and was who he said he was, and who the Scriptures teach that he was and is, then that should be reflected by how we live. For if I am convinced that Jesus is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Scripture regarding the Christ (the Messiah) who was to come, then I will submit to his Lordship (kingship) over my life, I will surrender my will to his will for my life, and I will let him deliver me from bondage to sin. And I will obey him and his commandments, and not resist him and his will.

Thus, it is not enough to just make an intellectual assent to Jesus being the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God, for if that is what we really believe then we will live what we say we believe. For belief is not just in our minds, but it is in our actions, and it is reflected in our behaviors. The same it is with love. For to love is in action, and it is to prefer what God prefers, and if we love God/Christ, in truth, then we will obey him and his commands. For if sin is what we practice, and not obedience, we don’t really know God/Christ at all.

Now if we are to love one another with this same love, we must first love God/Christ with the love which honors him as King of our lives, which submits to his Lordship over our lives, and which obeys him, in practice. Then we can love one another as Christ loves us with an unselfish and self-sacrificial love which regards the true needs of others above thoughts of whether or not they will like us in return, and of what it might cost us, and without regard to how others view us and receive us, just like Jesus loves.

For to love God and our fellow humans requires that we put the will and purpose of God, of Christ, in the forefront, and that we love as God/Christ loves us and gave his life up for on that cross. For Jesus submitted to being crucified on a cross, taking upon himself the sins of the entire world, in order to put our sin to death with him so that we, by faith in him, might die with him to sin and now live for him in walks of surrender to his will and in obedience to his commands in holy living, by God’s grace, in his power.

So if we love the people of this world, including those who profess faith in the Lord Jesus, with this same love, which comes from God, we will not lie to the people. We will not tell them stories to make them feel good while we withhold from them the truth of the gospel which, by faith in the Lord, can deliver their souls from hell, and can free them from their addiction to sin, and will give them a new lease on life free to live for God/Jesus Christ and no longer for the sinful pleasures of the flesh. Because that is love!

[Matt 7:13-14,21-23; Matt 24:9-14; Lu 9:23-26; Jn 6:44; Jn 8:31-32; Jn 15:1-12; Rom 2:6-8; Rom 6:1-23; Rom 8:24; Rom 11:17-24; Rom 13:11; 1 Co 1:18; 1 Co 15:1-2; Gal 6:7-8; Eph 5:3-6; Col 1:21-23; 2 Tim 1:8-9; 2 Tim 2:10-13; Heb 9:28; Heb 3:6,14-15; 1 Pet 1:5,9; 2 Pet 1:5-11; 2 Pet 2:20-22; 1 Jn 1:5-10; 1 Jn 2:3-6,15-17,24-25; 1 Jn 3:4-10]

As the Deer

By Martin J. Nystrom
Based off Psalm 42:1

As the deer panteth for the water
So my soul longeth after You
You alone are my heart's desire
And I long to worship You

You alone are my strength, my shield
To You alone may my spirit yield
You alone are my heart's desire
And I long to worship You

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Jesus is The Christ
An Original Work / February 19, 2025
Christ’s Free Servant, Sue J Love

 

[Tom Storey]

This is so very intelligent and very beautifully expressed.

Here is my reflection of the opening of the Gospel of Saint John:

The opening passages of John’s Gospel affirm key, central truths concerning the nature of Christ. He is the Word, the perfect, ideal and original Word giving meaning and life to all utterance. We sense here the influence of classical Hellenic philosophy on the developing understanding of Christ through the first century. And, from the very first verses of his Gospel, John affirms the divinity of Christ. Christ is with God, the Father, and he is God. God the Father and God the Son are distinct and too of one being; they are consubstantial.

These Bile verses affirm in an incredibly dense, packed, manner key truths of our Christian faith. We hear that Christ is eternal. He was in the beginning with God, present already as time began. All was created through him. Christ is our saviour and he was instrumental in creation. We may extend this thought: just as Christ precedes creation, so his existence, his being, is rooted outside of space and time, beyond the limits and the possible limits of what we might now comprehend. He transcends our universe, and he is able and willing to intervene in his creation: our God is not merely a Deistic first cause or prime mover; he is watchful, active, alive with us, then as now. Christ’s life is not only the life he lived from his birth in Bethlehem to his crucifixion outside of the walls of Jerusalem; his life is our very origin, our light and our end.

Truly Christ’s life is our light. And we are told now, right at the start of John’s Gospel, just how strange and challenging a message this must have been. The terrible, glorious climax of Christ’s life is written into the beginning of John’s Gospel. ‘And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not… He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.’ Even now, to us, this may seem a strange message. How could people not know God was with them? It seems extraordinary. Christ’s followers, the saints, become privileged to know the arcane. It is as if to us a great and unworldly secret has been revealed. We are truly privileged. And it is a most wonderful time, as we celebrate the nativity of Christ, to reflect on this lack of seeing, and to give ourselves over anew to Christ, to see him always so very close to us when we ask him to be here, and then realise he is already.

We may reflect now as well on just how incredible a gift Christ’s life is for us. God became man. The Word was made flesh. He dwelt among us. As we have in the original Greek of the Bible, he set his tent, his tabernacle, among us. We are reminded of God’s tent through Israel’s wanderings. Christ took on our humanity, with all that this entails apart from sin. It is precisely because of this that we are enabled, by Christ, to become the sons of God. We were created by and through Christ, and now Christ is one of us. The transcendent and the temporal have joined in human flesh. The creator and his creation are joined. We are illuminated.

Lastly, we may consider the meaning of this verse: ‘For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.’ As we are taught, Christ is the fulfilment of the law. The relationship of a Christian with the Jewish law, the law of Moses, is not entirely clear cut. We obey, or we seek to obey, the ten commandments, and the manifold extrapolations thereof. We do not as a rule circumcise our young or follow every precept of Leviticus, for example the dietary laws. Christ affirms that he is not come to abolish the law, and yet he is strongly critical of those Jews who are perhaps sticklers for the letter of the law and yet do not know or practise its spirit. Christ is seen by some as having broken the Sabbath, for example; and he explicitly refutes the dietary laws, telling us that it is not what goes into a man that defiles a man. The New and the Old Testaments seem at times to be held in uneasy alliance with one another.

Paul will go on to develop this point. One important suggestion of Paul is that it is pretty much impossible for a mere human being to obey the law of Moses. People go wrong. With the best will in the world, people make mistakes. People sin. And here we are again with this complete and beautiful revelation of Christ’s love for us. The law was given by Moses; grace and truth are through Jesus Christ. We are forgiven.